When I ask them if their TV is slower, they look at me if _I_ am stoopid.
Because they know a TV is a dumb appliance that just sits there without getting software installed on a regular basis, so your analogy is stupid. Give them a little credit. Operating systems with all the assorted application software are complex, and any number of things can go wrong.
The GPL is just a temporary measure to give Free Software a chance to survive until copyright on software is abolished. Once that happens, people can try to make Free Software proprietary all they want without any legal problems.
RMS is on record stating that the GPL "freedom" of requiring source code should be enshrined in law if copyright was to go away.
The main thing is more detection and tracking, though, because the lead time is essential. This should be considered a major defense priority.
If the chances are one in millions, then no, it shouldn't be. Even a "city-killer" will likely end up doing no or little damage unless it actually strikes near a city (improbable). I approve of a token effort that ramps up along with civilization, but there are higher priority things to worry about, like extreme solar flare events.
The CNet article you linked to is about ads on Google.com. Does the Nexus 7 force you onto Google.com?
I don't know, and it misses the point. If you want to avoid the Google ads for their own products on their search page, you have to avoid their search page, which is analogous to the reason you didn't want to buy the competing product to the Nexus 7. As the article points out, such kind of advertising on Google's home page is very unusual except for a few self-serving cases.
Why would a company pay to have their ad next to a photo of your friend from high-school throwing up, when they can place it next to a fashion spread of Kate Moss?
Market data, that's why. By knowing so much about the person they are advertising too, they can create more effective ads. Facebook is an underutilized goldmine for advertising, and I think there's a good chance Facebook eventually figures it out and justifies their high IPO price. Then again, they may just fall victim to the "Next Big Thing". Time will tell.
I don't know how common this sort of thing is in Italy, but in Netherland, it's practically national news when a police officer even draws a gun
And the Netherlands are also high up on the good end of the countries list I referenced, as I've noted previously. What happened at that protest in Italy almost certainly had deeper roots than just that one incident.
Keep in mind that in the US these things often don't even go to trial at all. Yes, late and limited consequences sucks, but no trial or acquittal is even worse.
This Italian case was of international interest, both because of the size and because it included internationals injured in the protest. Even then the bare minimum of justice was served. You can also find cases in the US where justice for police brutality is served, though too often it goes unpunished.
Again, the US is nothing to be proud of, but it isn't the hellhole of countries you made it out to be.
Information about similar cases is abundant on the internet, and they often get reported on sites like Slashdot and BoingBoing. [..] This kind of thing making it to trial is rare, and they do, they often get acquitted despite obvious guilt.
Yes, these cases are disgusting. However, do similar cases get similar coverage in other countries? My feeling is not. You won't find many English reports of individual police abuse in European countries, and I doubt it is because they don't exist. As the Italian case shows, the mentality that leads to these kind of cases exist elsewhere.
In the Italian case you refer to, it took long, but it did go to trial, and they were convicted, even if the actual sentence is way too light.
A conviction over 10 years later with extremely limited consequences = no justice.
Spain used to be a police state under Franco, and I believe the guardia civil is still quite feared there, but even then I've never heard of them entering the home of a disabled army veteran and shooting him for no reason, and getting away with it.
Italy is notorious for its endemic corruption, but as far as I know, not to the extent that people fear the police. No doubt lots of police there have been bribed by the mafia, but even they don't shoot, taze, mace or kick citizens for no reason, and if they do, they will be investigated, unlike in the US, where police very often get away with police brutality.
Justice?: "Eleven years after Italian police savagely beat scores of protesters at the Genoa G8 meeting in 2001, leaving one British activist in a coma, an Italian court has upheld the convictions of senior officers for their roles in the raid.
The decision by Italy's cassation court, after an initial trial and an appeal, draws a definitive line underneath the violence, which Amnesty International described as the most serious suspension of democratic rights in a western country since the second world war.
The final sentences have been watered down by the statute of limitations and the accused will not be jailed, but a number of top-ranking officers now face five-year suspensions from duty."
By the way, your corruption perception index seems to be about corruption in general, and not specifically police brutality.
You're right, but it was the best I could come up with to get a listing, and I think this kind of thing goes hand in hand.
It bothers me that overt $2000/person/year is spent on adertising in the US per inhabitant, i.e. including all babies, children, adults. That's a huge waste, a kind of regressive tax.
There's a saying by marketers that they know half of all their advertising dollars are wasted, just not which half. On the other hand, advertising does work, and it can serve a legitimate function in bringing buyers to products that they really do want and wouldn't have found otherwise.
Not that I like ads, as I use AdBlock and generally try to avoid them, but I'm somewhat sympathetic for their existence.
Some ads are so slick that even the most rabid frothing anti-ad person will let them slide by. Car dealers is one - On the back of a ton of cars is "Joe's Ford" etc. The other one is mobile phone ads "Sent from my ___".
There's nothing slick about those examples, and as an anti-ad person I've always found them obnoxious, particularly because they are on items that are being paid for by the consumer.
And if the lawsuit did kill it, well then maybe it deserved to die for having such stupid rules that won't even let the MAN BEING TALKED ABOUT correct his own damn page.
There's a very good reason for that. What's on the page could be correct, but disliked by the subject. This happens all the time. Furthermore, he attempted to get the page changed through "an official interlocutor", whatever that means.
It would be akin to wikpedia publishing, "Glenn Beck raped a woman when he was a college student," and Beck tells them that never happened + no such criminal record exists.
That's a stupid analogy because whether there's a criminal record or a news source cited with the allegation is a point of fact. This case is about a literary interpretation of a book, and some amount of speculation by literary figures is par for the course. I think this commit comment sums it up nicely:
"Inspiration: there was no "error" by wikipedia, just well-cited reports of speculations by prominent critics. If the critics were wrong, that's on them)"
Are you saying it's wrong to compare the US to Europe, and I should compare it to a third world country instead?
You didn't specify European countries, you said "most countries". If you want to move the goal posts then I can respond to that as well. For example, if you look at the map France is just under the US, Spain and Portugal are worse, and Italy looks very bad. Things get even worse when you start moving east and looking at Eastern Europe. So now you're going to say your comments only apply to Western Europe?
In that case, I agree that for a third world country, the US is absolutely fantastic. But do you really want to lay the bar so low?
Russia isn't a third world country and it's near the bottom. I'm not saying I'm proud or happy with the US, but the picture you were painting was bullshit.
In most other countries it's nowhere near that bad.
I think it's the opposite. Police corruption is a notorious problem, and if you threw a dart at a country list I'm willing to bet I could find equal or worse problems elsewhere. To back this up, take a look at Corruption Perceptions Index 2011. It shows the Netherlands at #7 with 8.9 and the United States as #24 with 7.1.
These days it is fashionable to bash the US in Europe, and while the worst stories get the most press, it doesn't reflect everyday life. The other thing is that if you are getting hassled by a cop, it's important to know your rights and how to handle it. That doesn't mean you should take the extreme of being an unhelpful dick in your every interaction with the police.
I'm an American, and my interaction with the police have all been relatively positive. If some cop came to my door trying to solve a crime I had nothing to do with, I would try to help them. If you want to know the source of this attitude, look at: Don't Talk to the Police, which has been published on Slashdot before.
The general message in that video is that talking to the police can lead you into trouble, whether you're guilty or innocent, and you should invoke your constitutional right to remain silent. While I believe this is true, the sentiment in this video vastly overstates the risk and takes an extreme view that ends up harming society. If you want crimes to be solved, people need to talk to the police.
Meanwhile Nokia did publish a Maemo phone, the N900. This was quite an OK phone, and got good reviews. Nokia was back on track.
How much was it selling? How did its sales compare to Android and iPhone? The only thing I heard about the N900 in the press wsa from Slashdot geeks who liked it for Linux. As a Slashdot geek who runs Linux, I approve, but I never bought one and I didn't see them gaining any significant marketshare.
This makes me think the decision to destroy Nokia was in some way dictated by US interests. Why the Finnish government accepted all this is beyond me - they must have gotten something valuable in return.
[Note: I'm going to pull in quotes from your other post to keep this down to one reply.]
A particular scientist is an atheist. This causes him to reach the conclusion that Evolution explains the origin of specials.
You keep on repeating this, but it doesn't make it true. I argue instead that science reaches the conclusion of evolution, and it leads to atheism. That's true from my personal perspective, and that's also what history shows. Early scientists were religious, even greats like Isaac Newton. As science progressed, and especially with the science of evolution, religious belief among scientists went way down.
The reason is obvious, and you already agreed with the basic point: "Rational thinking and the scientific method dispels mysticism." Now the challenge for you is to prove the Bible isn't Hebrew mythology when looked at under a scientific and rational lens, as that is what drives a large percentage of creationist thinking, and is particularly true in your case.
The historical documents are contained in the Bible. There have been numberous arguments advanced to discredit it, but I find them about as convincing as conspiracy theories about the destruction of the World Trade Center. [..] If you cannot respect such a point of view, discussion is pointless.
Ridiculous. On the one hand you talk dismissively about fringe conspiracy theories, and on the other hand you ask for respect for your belief in ancient Hebrew mythology. Discussion is worthwhile if sincere arguments are being made. Respect for viewpoints doesn't have to be part of the picture.
Again, this is a question about which reasonable persons can disagree. Is the branching really due to common descent, or is it the inevitable result of any attempt to classify a large body of work? After all, we can classify computers in much the same way, but they don't even reproduce.
Why limit yourself to computers? We're talking about the tree of life, so to make an accurate comparison you should talk about all of technology, the basis for intelligent design. There you see mixing and matching everywhere. All kinds of devices contain clocks (cars, microwaves, coffee makers, cell phones, etc.), yet you wouldn't classify them as a tree that inherited the clock feature.
That's just one example, and there are countless other innovations like plastic, metals, semiconductors, integrated circuits, etc. I defy you to come up with a tree classification for technology that doesn't have a pervasive mixing and matching across branches unlike anything seen in the tree of life.
With the tree in doubt, it is hard to assert that features were not mixed and matched. In fact, I seem to recall that there are seeming examples of mixing and matching. These are cases where identical or highly similiar features seem to have evolved more than once. (There are of course theories to explain this this away. But, there always are.)
It's a matter of scope. Of course it's possible for something to be evolved multiple times, as a simple probability argument will tell you. Yet while you might find some examples, the tree isn't pervasive with them. Also, in some cases that naively suggest mixing and matching, we still find evidence for common descent, as in the whale.
Nor is the progression clear. First of all, there are aknowledged gaps. Entire careers are devoted to trying to figure out why the intermediate forms 'didn't find their way into the fossile record'. Second, trees derived from the fossile record often fail to match trees derived from genetic analysis.
I'll grant you it's an uncertain science, and there are bound to be misclassifications, yet the overall structure is there. Also, while creationists will harp on gaps, history has shown that they are continually filled in as more discoveries are made in the fossil record.
As I already mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the change is a big deal for Gnome, as they lose out on users who accept the default. I'm not saying whether it is wrong or right, good or bad, just that it is a material change.
If the game detected an illegitimate copy, it would let you play the game for a few minutes without saying anything, at which point all of your units and buildings would explode and you would lose the game.
Or in other words, how to make sure that somebody who pirated a copy would be pissed off enough to never buy a copy or give it word-of-mouth benefits.
To argue about whether this idea is part of a mystical belief system is to miss the point. The point is that it either is or is not an historic fact. What religionists do, say, or believe is totally irrelevent.
Funny, because you claim the opposite, that it is atheism that is the important factor. When you acknowledge my points for the opposite, you again repeat your claim and say religion doesn't matter.
[scientists looked at the evidence] That is what they assert. Now you have repeated this assertion. What is that worth to me?
Not less than your empty assertions are to me. If you want details of the assertion, fine, but I figured by now you've heard them.
It is not irrational to believe that superhumans created the world if there is evidence which tends to support such a view. It is not irrational to believe that these same superhumans communicated with man in the past if there are historical documents which attest to this.
And your evidence?
This does not mean that everyone has to believe that these evidences are reliable, but to say that those who do are behaving irrationally is dishonest.
When enough of the evidence accumulates, at some point you've either got your head in the sand or you're just clinging to mysticism for any number of reasons, and then trying to hide behind the cover of "reason", like the Discovery Institute.
I disbelieve them because when they are backed into a corner they make statements which sound like expresions of faith in Rationalism and argue on a philisophical rather than an evidentary basis. What little evidence they do cite is compatible with Evolutionary theory, but is also compatible with belief in a creator.
"Little" evidence? The fossil record and DNA record show evolution, not an intelligent designer. There's a clear progression from the simplest forms like bacteria to the more complicated forms. The genetic and fossil record show branching, which is what you would expect from evolution, but not creationism. An intelligent designer wouldn't limit themselves to branching, and would instead mix and match features arbitrarily.
They assert (likely truthfully) that they do not believe in creation and are certain that furthur research will clear up these little difficulties.
That's the way science operates. When the overwhelming evidence points in one way, "little difficulties" are acknowledged and worked on. Yet creationists focus on these little difficulties while accepting the huge flaws in their own theories. Mote, meet beam. Beam, meet mote.
Slashdot Mirror
When I ask them if their TV is slower, they look at me if _I_ am stoopid.
Because they know a TV is a dumb appliance that just sits there without getting software installed on a regular basis, so your analogy is stupid. Give them a little credit. Operating systems with all the assorted application software are complex, and any number of things can go wrong.
Creep.
The GPL is just a temporary measure to give Free Software a chance to survive until copyright on software is abolished. Once that happens, people can try to make Free Software proprietary all they want without any legal problems.
RMS is on record stating that the GPL "freedom" of requiring source code should be enshrined in law if copyright was to go away.
The main thing is more detection and tracking, though, because the lead time is essential. This should be considered a major defense priority.
If the chances are one in millions, then no, it shouldn't be. Even a "city-killer" will likely end up doing no or little damage unless it actually strikes near a city (improbable). I approve of a token effort that ramps up along with civilization, but there are higher priority things to worry about, like extreme solar flare events.
The CNet article you linked to is about ads on Google.com. Does the Nexus 7 force you onto Google.com?
I don't know, and it misses the point. If you want to avoid the Google ads for their own products on their search page, you have to avoid their search page, which is analogous to the reason you didn't want to buy the competing product to the Nexus 7. As the article points out, such kind of advertising on Google's home page is very unusual except for a few self-serving cases.
Why would a company pay to have their ad next to a photo of your friend from high-school throwing up, when they can place it next to a fashion spread of Kate Moss?
Market data, that's why. By knowing so much about the person they are advertising too, they can create more effective ads. Facebook is an underutilized goldmine for advertising, and I think there's a good chance Facebook eventually figures it out and justifies their high IPO price. Then again, they may just fall victim to the "Next Big Thing". Time will tell.
I don't know how common this sort of thing is in Italy, but in Netherland, it's practically national news when a police officer even draws a gun
And the Netherlands are also high up on the good end of the countries list I referenced, as I've noted previously. What happened at that protest in Italy almost certainly had deeper roots than just that one incident.
Keep in mind that in the US these things often don't even go to trial at all. Yes, late and limited consequences sucks, but no trial or acquittal is even worse.
This Italian case was of international interest, both because of the size and because it included internationals injured in the protest. Even then the bare minimum of justice was served. You can also find cases in the US where justice for police brutality is served, though too often it goes unpunished.
Again, the US is nothing to be proud of, but it isn't the hellhole of countries you made it out to be.
Information about similar cases is abundant on the internet, and they often get reported on sites like Slashdot and BoingBoing. [..] This kind of thing making it to trial is rare, and they do, they often get acquitted despite obvious guilt.
Yes, these cases are disgusting. However, do similar cases get similar coverage in other countries? My feeling is not. You won't find many English reports of individual police abuse in European countries, and I doubt it is because they don't exist. As the Italian case shows, the mentality that leads to these kind of cases exist elsewhere.
In the Italian case you refer to, it took long, but it did go to trial, and they were convicted, even if the actual sentence is way too light.
A conviction over 10 years later with extremely limited consequences = no justice.
Spain used to be a police state under Franco, and I believe the guardia civil is still quite feared there, but even then I've never heard of them entering the home of a disabled army veteran and shooting him for no reason, and getting away with it.
I don't even know what case you're talking about, and I searched and could not find it. As for Spain: http://www.google.com/search?q=spain%20police%20brutality
Italy is notorious for its endemic corruption, but as far as I know, not to the extent that people fear the police. No doubt lots of police there have been bribed by the mafia, but even they don't shoot, taze, mace or kick citizens for no reason, and if they do, they will be investigated, unlike in the US, where police very often get away with police brutality.
Justice?: "Eleven years after Italian police savagely beat scores of protesters at the Genoa G8 meeting in 2001, leaving one British activist in a coma, an Italian court has upheld the convictions of senior officers for their roles in the raid.
The decision by Italy's cassation court, after an initial trial and an appeal, draws a definitive line underneath the violence, which Amnesty International described as the most serious suspension of democratic rights in a western country since the second world war.
The final sentences have been watered down by the statute of limitations and the accused will not be jailed, but a number of top-ranking officers now face five-year suspensions from duty."
By the way, your corruption perception index seems to be about corruption in general, and not specifically police brutality.
You're right, but it was the best I could come up with to get a listing, and I think this kind of thing goes hand in hand.
The real irony is that an "advertisement company" has enough sense to limit their ads to websites that I have the freedom to avoid if I choose
Except when they are advertising their own products, like Chrome or the Nexus 7 you are planning to buy.
It bothers me that overt $2000/person/year is spent on adertising in the US per inhabitant, i.e. including all babies, children, adults. That's a huge waste, a kind of regressive tax.
There's a saying by marketers that they know half of all their advertising dollars are wasted, just not which half. On the other hand, advertising does work, and it can serve a legitimate function in bringing buyers to products that they really do want and wouldn't have found otherwise.
Not that I like ads, as I use AdBlock and generally try to avoid them, but I'm somewhat sympathetic for their existence.
Some ads are so slick that even the most rabid frothing anti-ad person will let them slide by. Car dealers is one - On the back of a ton of cars is "Joe's Ford" etc. The other one is mobile phone ads "Sent from my ___".
There's nothing slick about those examples, and as an anti-ad person I've always found them obnoxious, particularly because they are on items that are being paid for by the consumer.
And if the lawsuit did kill it, well then maybe it deserved to die for having such stupid rules that won't even let the MAN BEING TALKED ABOUT correct his own damn page.
There's a very good reason for that. What's on the page could be correct, but disliked by the subject. This happens all the time. Furthermore, he attempted to get the page changed through "an official interlocutor", whatever that means.
It would be akin to wikpedia publishing, "Glenn Beck raped a woman when he was a college student," and Beck tells them that never happened + no such criminal record exists.
That's a stupid analogy because whether there's a criminal record or a news source cited with the allegation is a point of fact. This case is about a literary interpretation of a book, and some amount of speculation by literary figures is par for the course. I think this commit comment sums it up nicely:
"Inspiration: there was no "error" by wikipedia, just well-cited reports of speculations by prominent critics. If the critics were wrong, that's on them)"
Are you saying it's wrong to compare the US to Europe, and I should compare it to a third world country instead?
You didn't specify European countries, you said "most countries". If you want to move the goal posts then I can respond to that as well. For example, if you look at the map France is just under the US, Spain and Portugal are worse, and Italy looks very bad. Things get even worse when you start moving east and looking at Eastern Europe. So now you're going to say your comments only apply to Western Europe?
In that case, I agree that for a third world country, the US is absolutely fantastic. But do you really want to lay the bar so low?
Russia isn't a third world country and it's near the bottom. I'm not saying I'm proud or happy with the US, but the picture you were painting was bullshit.
I should mention that in the corruption list I referred to a higher score is better, and that there are 182 countries in the list.
In most other countries it's nowhere near that bad.
I think it's the opposite. Police corruption is a notorious problem, and if you threw a dart at a country list I'm willing to bet I could find equal or worse problems elsewhere. To back this up, take a look at Corruption Perceptions Index 2011. It shows the Netherlands at #7 with 8.9 and the United States as #24 with 7.1.
These days it is fashionable to bash the US in Europe, and while the worst stories get the most press, it doesn't reflect everyday life. The other thing is that if you are getting hassled by a cop, it's important to know your rights and how to handle it. That doesn't mean you should take the extreme of being an unhelpful dick in your every interaction with the police.
I'm an American, and my interaction with the police have all been relatively positive. If some cop came to my door trying to solve a crime I had nothing to do with, I would try to help them. If you want to know the source of this attitude, look at: Don't Talk to the Police, which has been published on Slashdot before.
The general message in that video is that talking to the police can lead you into trouble, whether you're guilty or innocent, and you should invoke your constitutional right to remain silent. While I believe this is true, the sentiment in this video vastly overstates the risk and takes an extreme view that ends up harming society. If you want crimes to be solved, people need to talk to the police.
Meanwhile Nokia did publish a Maemo phone, the N900. This was quite an OK phone, and got good reviews. Nokia was back on track.
How much was it selling? How did its sales compare to Android and iPhone? The only thing I heard about the N900 in the press wsa from Slashdot geeks who liked it for Linux. As a Slashdot geek who runs Linux, I approve, but I never bought one and I didn't see them gaining any significant marketshare.
This makes me think the decision to destroy Nokia was in some way dictated by US interests. Why the Finnish government accepted all this is beyond me - they must have gotten something valuable in return.
Or maybe your tin-foil hat is on too tight.
[Note: I'm going to pull in quotes from your other post to keep this down to one reply.]
A particular scientist is an atheist. This causes him to reach the conclusion that Evolution explains the origin of specials.
You keep on repeating this, but it doesn't make it true. I argue instead that science reaches the conclusion of evolution, and it leads to atheism. That's true from my personal perspective, and that's also what history shows. Early scientists were religious, even greats like Isaac Newton. As science progressed, and especially with the science of evolution, religious belief among scientists went way down.
The reason is obvious, and you already agreed with the basic point: "Rational thinking and the scientific method dispels mysticism." Now the challenge for you is to prove the Bible isn't Hebrew mythology when looked at under a scientific and rational lens, as that is what drives a large percentage of creationist thinking, and is particularly true in your case.
The historical documents are contained in the Bible. There have been numberous arguments advanced to discredit it, but I find them about as convincing as conspiracy theories about the destruction of the World Trade Center. [..] If you cannot respect such a point of view, discussion is pointless.
Ridiculous. On the one hand you talk dismissively about fringe conspiracy theories, and on the other hand you ask for respect for your belief in ancient Hebrew mythology. Discussion is worthwhile if sincere arguments are being made. Respect for viewpoints doesn't have to be part of the picture.
Again, this is a question about which reasonable persons can disagree. Is the branching really due to common descent, or is it the inevitable result of any attempt to classify a large body of work? After all, we can classify computers in much the same way, but they don't even reproduce.
Why limit yourself to computers? We're talking about the tree of life, so to make an accurate comparison you should talk about all of technology, the basis for intelligent design. There you see mixing and matching everywhere. All kinds of devices contain clocks (cars, microwaves, coffee makers, cell phones, etc.), yet you wouldn't classify them as a tree that inherited the clock feature.
That's just one example, and there are countless other innovations like plastic, metals, semiconductors, integrated circuits, etc. I defy you to come up with a tree classification for technology that doesn't have a pervasive mixing and matching across branches unlike anything seen in the tree of life.
With the tree in doubt, it is hard to assert that features were not mixed and matched. In fact, I seem to recall that there are seeming examples of mixing and matching. These are cases where identical or highly similiar features seem to have evolved more than once. (There are of course theories to explain this this away. But, there always are.)
It's a matter of scope. Of course it's possible for something to be evolved multiple times, as a simple probability argument will tell you. Yet while you might find some examples, the tree isn't pervasive with them. Also, in some cases that naively suggest mixing and matching, we still find evidence for common descent, as in the whale.
Nor is the progression clear. First of all, there are aknowledged gaps. Entire careers are devoted to trying to figure out why the intermediate forms 'didn't find their way into the fossile record'. Second, trees derived from the fossile record often fail to match trees derived from genetic analysis.
I'll grant you it's an uncertain science, and there are bound to be misclassifications, yet the overall structure is there. Also, while creationists will harp on gaps, history has shown that they are continually filled in as more discoveries are made in the fossil record.
We are talking about the fact th
As I already mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the change is a big deal for Gnome, as they lose out on users who accept the default. I'm not saying whether it is wrong or right, good or bad, just that it is a material change.
As in you think I need your "expertise"? You're delusional.
Yet more empty rhetoric by the lazy hypocrite.
If the game detected an illegitimate copy, it would let you play the game for a few minutes without saying anything, at which point all of your units and buildings would explode and you would lose the game.
Or in other words, how to make sure that somebody who pirated a copy would be pissed off enough to never buy a copy or give it word-of-mouth benefits.
Annoying Fan? I liked that guy. I kept him around in one of my rooms. Kinda nice to have somebody appreciative of you when you came home :)
To argue about whether this idea is part of a mystical belief system is to miss the point. The point is that it either is or is not an historic fact. What religionists do, say, or believe is totally irrelevent.
Funny, because you claim the opposite, that it is atheism that is the important factor. When you acknowledge my points for the opposite, you again repeat your claim and say religion doesn't matter.
[scientists looked at the evidence] That is what they assert. Now you have repeated this assertion. What is that worth to me?
Not less than your empty assertions are to me. If you want details of the assertion, fine, but I figured by now you've heard them.
It is not irrational to believe that superhumans created the world if there is evidence which tends to support such a view. It is not irrational to believe that these same superhumans communicated with man in the past if there are historical documents which attest to this.
And your evidence?
This does not mean that everyone has to believe that these evidences are reliable, but to say that those who do are behaving irrationally is dishonest.
When enough of the evidence accumulates, at some point you've either got your head in the sand or you're just clinging to mysticism for any number of reasons, and then trying to hide behind the cover of "reason", like the Discovery Institute.
I disbelieve them because when they are backed into a corner they make statements which sound like expresions of faith in Rationalism and argue on a philisophical rather than an evidentary basis. What little evidence they do cite is compatible with Evolutionary theory, but is also compatible with belief in a creator.
"Little" evidence? The fossil record and DNA record show evolution, not an intelligent designer. There's a clear progression from the simplest forms like bacteria to the more complicated forms. The genetic and fossil record show branching, which is what you would expect from evolution, but not creationism. An intelligent designer wouldn't limit themselves to branching, and would instead mix and match features arbitrarily.
They assert (likely truthfully) that they do not believe in creation and are certain that furthur research will clear up these little difficulties.
That's the way science operates. When the overwhelming evidence points in one way, "little difficulties" are acknowledged and worked on. Yet creationists focus on these little difficulties while accepting the huge flaws in their own theories. Mote, meet beam. Beam, meet mote.